1. Bless the President for having rescue teams in the air almost
immediately. That was President Olafur Grimsson of Iceland. On
Wednesday, the AP reported that the President of the United States
promised, "The initial contingent of 2,000 Marines could be deployed to
the quake-ravaged country within the next few days." "In a few days," Mr. Obama?

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2. There's no such thing as a 'natural' disaster. 200,000
Haitians have been slaughtered by slum housing and IMF "austerity"
plans.

3. A friend of mine called. Do I know a journalist who could
get medicine to her father? And she added, trying to hold her voice
together, "My sister, she's under the rubble. Is anyone going who can
help, anyone?" Should I tell her, "Obama will have Marines there in 'a
few days'"?

5. Obama's Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, "I don't know
how this government could have responded faster or more comprehensively
than it has." We know Gates doesn't know.

6.
From my own work in the field, I know that FEMA has access to
ready-to-go potable water, generators, mobile medical equipment and
more for hurricane relief on the Gulf Coast. It's all still there. Army
Lt. Gen. Russel Honore', who served as the task force commander for
emergency response after Hurricane Katrina, told the Christian Science
Monitor, "I thought we had learned that from Katrina, take food and
water and start evacuating people." Maybe we learned but, apparently, Gates and the Defense Department missed school that day.

7.
Send in the Marines. That's America's response. That's what
we're good at. The aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson finally showed up
after three days. With what? It was dramatically deployed -- without any emergency relief supplies. It has sidewinder missiles and 19 helicopters.

8. But don't worry, the International Search and Rescue Team,
fully equipped and self-sufficient for up to seven days in the field,
deployed immediately with ten metric tons of tools and equipment, three
tons of water, tents, advanced communication equipment and water
purifying capability. They're from Iceland.

9. Gates wouldn't send in food and water because, he said,
there was no "structure ... to provide security." For Gates, appointed
by Bush and allowed to hang around by Obama, it's security first. That was his lesson from Hurricane Katrina. Blackwater before drinking water.

10.
Previous US presidents have acted far more swiftly in getting troops on
the ground on that island. Haiti is the right half of the island of
Hispaniola. It's treated like the right testicle of Hell. The Dominican
Republic the left. In 1965, when Dominicans demanded the return of Juan
Bosch, their elected President, deposed by a junta, Lyndon Johnson
reacted to this crisis rapidly, landing 45,000 US Marines on the
beaches to prevent the return of the elected president.

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11.
How did Haiti end up so economically weakened, with infrastructure,
from hospitals to water systems, busted or non-existent - there are two
fire stations in the entire nation - and infrastructure so frail that
the nation was simply waiting for "nature" to finish it off?

Don't blame Mother Nature for all this death and destruction. That
dishonor goes to Papa Doc and Baby Doc, the Duvalier dictatorship,
which looted the nation for 28 years. Papa and his Baby put an
estimated 80% of world aid into their own pockets - with the complicity
of the US government happy to have the Duvaliers and their voodoo
militia, Tonton Macoutes, as allies in the Cold War. (The war was
easily won: the Duvaliers' death squads murdered as many as 60,000
opponents of the regime.)

12. What Papa and Baby didn't run off with, the IMF finished off
through its "austerity" plans. An austerity plan is a form of voodoo
orchestrated by economists zomby-fied by an irrational belief that
cutting government services will somehow help a nation prosper.

Greg Palast's investigative reports appear in Rolling Stone, the Guardian and on BBC Television. His latest film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, on how Donald Trump stole the 2016 election, is available on Amazon. Palast is Patron of the Trinity (more...)